The New Yorker: Politics and More

A weekly discussion about the President and developments in Washington, hosted by The New Yorker's executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden, and featuring the magazine's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, and other contributors.

A weekly discussion about the President and developments in Washington, hosted by The New Yorker's executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden, and featuring the magazine's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, and other contributors.

A weekly discussion about the President and developments in Washington, hosted by The New Yorker's executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden, and featuring the magazine's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, and other contributors.

Episodes

On Tuesday, President Trump announced that he had fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and planned to replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Dexter Filkins joins Evan Osnos to discuss the changes at the top of the State Department and the CIA, and where the Trump administration is heading on foreign policy and national security.

The dossier—a secret report alleging various corrupt dealings between Donald Trump, his campaign, and the government of Russia, made public after the 2016 election—is one of the most hotly debated documents in Washington. The dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, is a former British spy working on contract, and went into hiding after its publication. “The Man Behind the Dossier,” Jane Mayer’s report on Steele, was just published in The New Yorker. She reports that Steele is in the...

Yesterday, the White House announced that President Trump would travel to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong-Un to discuss the regime's nuclear program. Robin Wright joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how the Administration's slapdash foreign policy is aiding the autocracies of North Korea, Iran, and Syria, and undermining American influence around the world.

A national conversation about gun control is gaining ground after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. But in the days just after the shooting Florida legislators voted against even debating gun control. The unwillingness of politicians across the country to address the crisis is rooted in the lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association, and in Florida the N.R.A.’s voice is a particularly powerful one. Marion Hammer is responsible for some of...

Teenaged survivors of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, already have begun to change the terms of debate over gun safety. Adam Gopnik joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how grassroots movements--from Mothers Against Drunk Driving to Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America--force social and political change.

Masha Gessen was born in Moscow, and came to this country with her family as a teenager, and she moved back and forth between the United States and Russia as an adult. Her work as a journalist and as a gay rights activist in both countries has made her uniquely positioned to write about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Donald Trump’s America, and how they intersect at this very fraught moment. “It’s like I was gifted with this special pair of eyeglasses,” she tells David Remnick.
Gessen is as...

What does the Trump Organization's unorthodox business conduct reveal about the Administration's political troubles with Special Counsel Robert Mueller? Adam Davidson joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how the Trump family's financial ties to Russian oligarchs led to extraordinarily risky behavior during the campaign and the current questions about obstruction of justice and collusion with Putin's Russia.

We now know that Russian operatives exploited Facebook and other social media to sow division and undermine the election of 2016, and special counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted Russian nationals and Russian entities for this activity. During that period, however, Facebook executives kept their heads down, and the C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, denied and underplayed the extent of the damage. Now Zuckerberg is in a process of soul-searching, attempting to right Facebook’s missteps—even if...

The tensions between President Trump and the intelligence agencies escalated this week. On Tuesday, the nation's top national security officials warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that the current security clearance program at the White House is broken, and that the country is dangerously vulnerable to ongoing cyber attacks by Russia. Evan Osnos joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how the Trump White House is undermining the nation's security.

The 2016 Presidential primaries were a rebuke to moderates in both parties. Bernie Sanders, a sometime Democratic Socialist, built a grassroots movement that bitterly rejected the centrist Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump, whose conservative credentials were deeply suspect, defeated sixteen Republican stalwarts. As the 2018 midterms approach, both parties are wrestling with the question of whether to rise with the tide of extremist sentiment, or run moderates to regain the center. Andrew...

This week, Rob Porter, an aide to President Trump, resigned after his two ex-wives went public with accusations that he'd been physically abusive. At the same time, the backlash against #MeToo continues. Jia Tolentino joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how to think about the public shaming of powerful men charged with sexual misconduct.

Laura Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University and a provocative feminist critic. Her book “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus” states, “If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama.” She has been accused of violating Title IX by creating a hostile environment for students to report harassment. Kipnis, who supports the movement, tells the staff writer Alexandra Schwartz that the grassroots power of public revelations is being hijacked by institutions in...

In his first State of the Union Address, President Trump made passing reference to making America's nuclear arsenal "so strong and so powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression by any other nation or anyone else." Also this week, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that the world is closer to a global nuclear war than at any time since the 1950s. Steve Coll joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the escalating risk of nuclear warfare under President Trump.

The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has had commercial and critical success: Her best-seller “Americanah” won a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and a speech she gave on feminism was sampled by Beyoncé. But Adichie is skeptical of fame, and not afraid to voice controversial opinions. At The New Yorker Festival in October, 2017, she spoke with David Remnick about how the left in this country seems “cannibalistic,” and how, as a Nigerian immigrant to America, she at first...

In June, President Trump ordered the firing of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. He changed his mind when Don McGahn, the White House counsel, threatened to resign. Jeffrey Toobin joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss Trump's growing legal vulnerabilities.

The Ku Klux Klan was originally focused on maintaining the old racial order in the postwar South, chiefly through the violent suppression of African-Americans. But, in the nineteen-twenties, the Klan was reborn as a nationwide movement targeting not only African-Americans but Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Mexican-Americans, and Asian immigrants. In the jingoistic years following the First World War, the Klan made discrimination the new patriotism. The Bancroft Prize-winning historian Linda...

With government shutdown looming over Washington, the G.O.P. finds itself once again mired in intra-party conflicts. Despite its struggles with basic governance, Republicans have begun to achieve many of their long-standing goals. John Cassidy joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how they're succeeding and where they're most vulnerable.

From the first day of Donald Trump’s Presidency, immigration and deportation have been at the top of the agenda—from the so-called Muslim ban to the use of DACA recipients as a bargaining chip in the quest for a border wall. Under his Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement overturned some of its priorities under President Obama. Immigration arrests rose forty per cent in 2017; in January, 2018, two hundred thousand refugees from catastrophic earthquakes in El Salvador were...

This week, Steve Bannon was ousted from his position as Executive Chairman of Breitbart News, the self-described "platform for the alt-right." Andrew Marantz joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the rise of the alt-right movement, and what Steve Bannon's downfall means for Trump and nationalist economic populism.

Nicolás Maduro was an unlikely successor to Venezuela’s popular and charismatic Hugo Chavez. And, since his election, the country has been wracked with devastating food shortages, a breakdown of ordinary services and medical care, and rampant violence. But, as Maduro sees it, the real problem is his political opponents, and he has taken steps to secure control over all the branches of government, in order to establish a de-facto dictatorship. The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson was recently...

Duration:00:14:08

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